I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]

Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.

The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.

And not all vote spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African American and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here.)

We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completely-leaving a 'hanging chad,'-or was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click here.)

And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.

So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz).

Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the election, Ã¢â‚¬Å“the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the stateÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.Ã¢â‚¬?

But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating Democratic votes. When asked if he feared being this year's Katherine Harris, Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat in Congress.

Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss-that's 110,000 votes-overwhelmingly Democratic.

The Impact of Challenges

First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws-almost never used-allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.

In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional" ballots-a kind of voting placebo-which may or may not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.

Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote

Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality-if all votes are counted-is more obvious still. Before the election, in TomPaine.com, I wrote, "John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted."

How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and the provisional ballots.

CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes. Again, the network total added up to that miraculous, and non-existent, '100 percent' of ballots cast.

New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts-Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.

Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'

Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.

I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.

Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.

"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?

Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.

Your Kerry Victory Party

So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry-if we count all the votes.

But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again. Why? No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting all the spoiled and provisional ballots will require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled and provisional ballots get tallied. Blackwell, hankering to step into Kate Harris' political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything close to a full count. Also, Democratic leadership knows darn well the media would punish the party for demanding a full count.

What now? Kerry won, so hold your victory party. But make sure the shades are down: it may be become illegal to demand a full vote count under PATRIOT Act III.

I used to write a column for the Guardian papers in London. Several friends have asked me if I will again leave the country. In light of the failure-a second time-to count all the votes, that won't be necessary. My country has left me.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD.

Never Say Die-bold: So You DonÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t Think the Bush Campaign Stole This Election? Think Again

By Jackson Thoreau

opEdNews.com

If youÃ¢â‚¬â„¢re looking for one word to sum up the way the Bush-Cheney campaign stole another election Tuesday besides obvious ones like Ã¢â‚¬Å“cheated,Ã¢â‚¬? try this one: Diebold.

An election judge where I voted Tuesday in a heavily Democratic precinct in Maryland knows what that means and wasnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t adverse to sharing his opinion of the Republican-owned company. As I was about to vote with the electronic system, I asked this judge if they had a way to check peopleÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s votes through a paper backup.

The official said no, and then in a low voice so no one else would hear, added, Ã¢â‚¬Å“And that really makes us nervous, with Diebold as the owner of that system.Ã¢â‚¬?

Diebold Inc. of North Canton, Ohio, supplied scores of machines and counted millions of votes Tuesday, while reportedly discarding many votes for Democrat John Kerry, according to British investigative reporter Gregory Palast. Walden OÃ¢â‚¬â„¢Dell, chief executive of Diebold and a top fundraiser for the Bush campaign, wrote in a fund-raising letter last year that he was Ã¢â‚¬Å“committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.Ã¢â‚¬?

That he did.

Software errors involving the system can change results, computer scientists say. Since the majority of touch screens in the United States do not produce paper records, the machines could alter ballots without anyone noticing.

Ã¢â‚¬Å“What has most concerned scientists are problems that are not observable, so the fact that no major problems were observed says nothing about the system,Ã¢â‚¬? David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, told the Associated Press. Ã¢â‚¬Å“The fact that we had a relatively smooth election yesterday does not change at all the vulnerability these systems have to fraud or bugs.Ã¢â‚¬?

Some 8.2 percent of touch-screen votes in senatorial elections between 1998 and 2000 were lost, according to an MIT/CalTech study. That was more than any other system except lever machines, which lost 9.5 percent of votes.

Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting and the BlackBoxVoting.com web site, has documented numerous cases of electronic disasters. One occurred in Volusia County, Fla., in 2000 in which county election officials hand recounted more than 184,000 paper ballots used to feed the computerized system, after the central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes and Al Gore getting minus 19,000. Another 4,000 votes were received for Bush that should not have been there.

Election officials eventually tallied Gore beating Bush by 97,063 votes to 82,214. But the wrong numbers had already been sent to the media, which were used by FOX and other networks to erroneously call the election for Bush and swing the public relations part of the recount battle in his favor.

On Tuesday, Election Protection, a program of People for the American Way, had more than 15,000 calls to its hotline about ballot problems, voter intimidation and other
situations.

The Institute for Public Accuracy also outlined various problems. Susan Truitt, co-founder of the Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, was quoted on its site saying that seven counties in Ohio had electronic voting machines without paper trails, and scientific exit polls showed Kerry with the lead. But verifying votes was impossible, she said.

Ã¢â‚¬Å“A recount without a paper trail is meaningless; you just get a regurgitation of the data,Ã¢â‚¬? Truitt said. Ã¢â‚¬Å“A poll worker told me [Wednesday] morning that there were no tapes of the results posted on some machines; on other machines the posted count was zero, which obviously shouldnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t be the case.Ã¢â‚¬?

Other problems include OhioÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s version of Katherine Harris

There were many other problems in Ohio. Like in Florida, the Ohio secretary of state, Ken Blackwell, made decisions on what could be counted and other important matters even as he shilled for Bush as a co-chair of his campaign. This raised serious conflict-of-interest concerns, said Ohio state Senator Teresa Fedor.

Ã¢â‚¬Å“There is a pattern of voter suppression; thatÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s why I called for BlackwellÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s resignation more than a month ago,Ã¢â‚¬? she said. Ã¢â‚¬Å“Blackwell, while claiming to run an unbiased elections process, was also the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. Additionally, he was the spokesperson for the anti-business, anti-family constitutional
amendment Ã¢â‚¬ËœIssue 1,Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ and a failed initiative to repeal a crucial sales-tax revenue source for the state. Blackwell learned his moves from the Katherine Harris playbook of Florida 2000, and we wonÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t stand for it.Ã¢â‚¬?

The Ohio tally also included a version of the Florida butterfly ballot, said Bob Fitrakis, an attorney with Election Protection. The absentee ballots were misleading in Franklin County,Ã¢â‚¬? he said. Ã¢â‚¬Å“Kerry was the third line down, but you had to punch number four to vote for him. Bush was getting both his votes as well as KerryÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s.Ã¢â‚¬?

There were also far fewer machines in the inner-city districts than in the suburbs, Fitrakis said. Ã¢â‚¬Å“I documented at least a dozen people leaving because the lines were so long in African-American areas,Ã¢â‚¬? he said. Ã¢â‚¬Å“Blackwell did a great deal of suppressing before the election - like attempting to refuse to process voter registration forms.Ã¢â‚¬?

I heard a report that one Ohio voter had to wait in line 15 hours to vote. In one of the busiest precincts in Columbus, Blackwell only supplied it with three voting
machines. How many people gave up and did not vote there?

Dirty tricks by Republicans on the rise

A few days before the 2004 election, the Washington Post published an article detailing increasing dirty tricks, mostly by Republicans.

In Lake County, Ohio, some people received a memo on bogus Board of Elections letterhead informing voters who registered through Democratic and NACCP drives that they could not vote.

In Leon County, students at Florida State and Florida A&M universities who signed petitions to legalize medical marijuana or impose stiffer penalties for child molesters unknowingly had their party registration switched to Republican and their addresses
changed. The latter would affect their ability to vote since they would not be registered at the proper site. The media traced the source to a group hired by the Florida Republican Party.

In Allegheny County, Pa., fliers on a bogus county letterhead were handed out and mailed, saying that Ã¢â‚¬Å“due to immense voter turnout expected on Tuesday,Ã¢â‚¬? the election had been extended. Republicans should vote Tuesday, while Democrats should vote on Wednesday Ã¢â‚¬â€œ the wrong day.

In some Milwaukee black neighborhoods, a flier warned people that they could not vote in that election if they had already voted in another election that year. Ã¢â‚¬Å“If you
violate any of these laws, you can get ten years in prison and your children will get taken away from you,Ã¢â‚¬? the flier said.

In Charleston County, S.C., a fake letter supposedly from the NAACP threatens
voters who have outstanding parking tickets or have failed to pay child support with arrest. A similar flier was distributed in Baltimore in 2002.

Such tricks are not new. There are famous examples like the 1971 break-in of Democratic National Committee headquarters by Nixon. There are also many lesser known examples. In 2002, Ron Kirk, a former Dallas mayor who ran as a Democrat for U.S. Senate, reported a bogus automated phone message dialed to voters in Austin and other cities. The message asked voters to support Kirk because he supported same-sex marriages and gay adoptions. Kirk said he didnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t support either issue and blamed more Republican pre-election dirty tricks. His Republican opponent, John Cornyn, denied being behind the false phone bank.

U.S. has a long history of rigged elections

The U.S., of course, is no stranger to rigged elections, even well before TuesdayÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s and the one in 2000. A famous case was the controversial way that the late President Lyndon B. Johnson won a U.S. Senate seat in 1948 in Texas on his way to the White House that reportedly involved votes from dead people. What some overlook in this case was how LBJ had lost an election in a similar disputed fashion seven years before.

Another lesser known case involved the 1984 landslide presidential election of the late Republican Ronald Reagan. In Dallas, where both Bush and Cheney lived at one time, there were 217 ballots cast in a precinct that had zero registered voters. That would not affect the election, but it demonstrates that fraud has existed for a long time.

As early as 1986, Michael Shamos, a Pennsylvania computer scientist, testified during a Texas hearing that the computer hardware and software used to tabulate votersÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ ballots could easily be manipulated.

Ã¢â‚¬Å“Computers can be manipulated remotely, by wire or radio, or by direct physical input,Ã¢â‚¬? Shamos said. Ã¢â‚¬Å“The memories on which these computers operate can easily fit into a shirt pocket and can be substituted in seconds. The software can be set to await the receipt of a special card, whose presence will cause all the election counters to be altered. This card could be dropped into the ballot box by any confederate. The possibilities for this type of tampering are endless, and virtually no detection is possible once tabulation has been completed....Even if the software is not altered, there is no reason to believe that it is correct. Many tests performed on such programs have revealed faulty logic and wildly incorrect results.Ã¢â‚¬?

Suzan Kesim, then-vice president of a security consulting firm in South Bend, Ind., also testified in 1986 that Ã¢â‚¬Å“many of the computer auditing procedures used by the banking industry that have been tried and true could easily be modified or used as they are for auditing elections....Fraud possibilities include Ã¢â‚¬Ëœhidden programsÃ¢â‚¬â„¢.Ã¢â‚¬?

Texas even had its own voter purge almost two decades before Florida attempted to strike some 60,000 voters from the rolls with false accusations of felony convictions. In 1982, lists were provided to Texas election officials that made mostly false accusations of felony convictions against voters. The accused included public officials who successfully sued for slander. The state also hired armed officers at minority voter precincts and posted signs warning voters against casting illegal ballots. Charles Knutson pointed out in a Democrats.com report that the Texas purge probably involved Bush mastermind Karl Rove, who worked for then-Texas Republican Gov. Bill Clements in 1982.

Another odd case involved a West Texas county where the systemÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s optical scanners misread ballots and at first reported landslide wins for two Republican commissioners in 2002. But the next day, after alert poll workers became suspicious of the wide margins of supposed victory, they discovered a defective computer chip in the scanner system. After two hand recounts and another count with a replacement scanner chip, officials announced that Democrats Jerry House and Chloanne Lindsey actually won by wide margins.

Ã¢â‚¬Å“It was hard to believe that that type of mistake had happened,Ã¢â‚¬? Robbie Floyd, one of the Republicans who lost, said in one press report.

So could Kerry have been ripped off by a defective computer chip in Ohio and Florida, where scientific exit polls indicated Kerry wins? We will never know since, unlike the Texas machines in 2002, the Diebold machines in Ohio and Florida have no paper trail.

How convenient.

Popular vote fixed?

With all the former and current Republicans supporting Kerry Ã¢â‚¬â€œ even a long-time Texas Republican friend of mine voted for a Democrat for the first time for president on Tuesday Ã¢â‚¬â€œ itÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s hard to believe that Bush got about 3.5 million more votes than Kerry and 8 million more than he received in 2000.

There canÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t be that many new devil worshippers or Christian fundamentalists.

A larger turnout Ã¢â‚¬â€œ TuesdayÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s 60 percent turnout was the largest since 1968 Ã¢â‚¬â€œ has favored Democrats in the past. But about 6 million of those votes have not been counted.

Some said that exit polls were accurate in states that had paper trails, but not in ones without the paper trails for e-voting.

Even though Kerry conceded, groups like the International Labor Communications Association refused to follow suit. The group is waging a campaign to count all the votes in Ohio.

KerryÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s concession was really strange and disappointing. Would Howard Dean have conceded so fast to Bush? Gore fought Bush harder than Kerry. I donÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t get it since Kerry even had Bruce Springsteen play Ã¢â‚¬Å“No Retreat, No SurrenderÃ¢â‚¬? at a campaign appearance and used that song during other events. John Edwards also pledged to make sure votes were counted. Then they surrendered without putting up a fight in the overtime phase. That was most disappointing, more so than GoreÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s concession in 2000.

Did Skull and Bones members blackmail Kerry into conceding without a real fight?

Perhaps Kerry simply foresaw the inevitable result, but he still could have seen the counting of provisional ballots through to the end. It would have raised some more awareness about the problems with Diebold and possibility of vote tampering. It would have shown Bush-Cheney that Democrats werenÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t backing down, especially with so many questions about vote reliability and reports of Republican voter suppression and dirty tricks.

But Kerry called for unity with the Evil Empire. Why is it that Democrats are always trying to call for unity and compromise with Republicanazis? As Carolyn Kay with MakeThemAccountable.com said, we have to completely remake the Democratic Party. We have to learn from right wingers to Ã¢â‚¬Å“take a licking and come back kicking. It is absolutely essential that as soon as possible we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start working to take over the Democratic Party. It has lost its moorings, and because of that it is losing elections, over and over and over again.Ã¢â‚¬?

Sure, the deck was stacked against Kerry. Perhaps the last week of bad news for Bush, the Washington Redskins loss, the exit polls, and other omens that seemed to spell a Kerry victory were mere ploys by Rove to make his side work harder and our side slack off a bit.

One thing I know: We have to keep fighting these cheating thieves, not try to make peace with them. And I hope many people on our side wonÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t move away Ã¢â‚¬â€œ though I realize moving out of the country is the ultimate protest and I understand that choice. We all have to figure out what is the best path to take for ourselves.

As for me, IÃ¢â‚¬â„¢m staying in the belly of the beast, in the shadow of the Evil Empire, to continue to sucker punch it in its bloated, bullshit-filled gut. Starting now, just as many conservatives boycotted France for its correct stance against the Iraqi invasion, IÃ¢â‚¬â„¢m boycotting the state of Texas, where I lived for 40 years before moving to friendlier and more progressive confines last year. Bush got his political start in Texas, where the Republicanazis imposed a redistricting scheme that made that far-right state even more Republican. Every statewide official is a Republican there. The Texas Republican Party platform reads like a nazi playbook, even calling for getting out of the UN, abolishing numerous federal agencies, making homosexuality a crime and teaching the Bible in public schools.

Enough is enough. Fuck Texas and the horses that Bush and Cheney rode in on.

And fuck Diebold, too.

As for you, Sen. Kerry, I appreciate your hard work, your intelligence, your dedication to this campaign, although I was disappointed by your finish. But, with all due respect, you know where you can stick your call for unityÃ¢â‚¬Â¦..

Jackson Thoreau is a Washington, D.C.-area journalist/writer. The latest book to which he contributed, Big Bush Lies, was published by RiverWood Books of Ashland, Ore., and is available at bookstores across the country. He can be contacted at jacksonthor@yahoo.com or jacksonthor@juno.com.